Sunday, December 22, 2013

WARNING: The links contained within this post will take you to sites with content for mature readers only. However, this post is suitable for a PG audience.

One of my favorite songs, regardless of the fact that it is considered a traditional holiday hymn, is O Holy Night. While I have eclectic tastes in music, there are certain sound preferences that I believe should accompany individual pieces. Around this time each year, Baby Doll sets out to look for different arrangements of O Holy Night that he feels will suite my tastes.

This year, John may have just out done himself. Baby Doll shared country music recording artist, John Berry‘s, version of the song earlier this week with me. Berry delivers a traditional rendition of a song that shares messages of hope, love, and peace. Those concepts can be understood by anyone regardless of their religious beliefs, or absence thereof.

While I have included the video at the end of this post, I am going to share the meaning behind one of my first holiday gifts from John twenty-two years ago. He gave me a cassette tape with a melody of Christmas songs. O Holy Night was one of the tracks. I had to promise him before hand that I would stay alive at least long enough to open my presents…

I met Baby Doll August 25, 1991 on the campus of the junior college in Hot Springs, Arkansas. Looking back on that day, if I had been him I would have ran as far away from me as possible. I had a rotten attitude and was very prideful. With my impending suicide just two days away, I wasn’t in the most logical frame of mind. Suicidal thoughts, depression, anger, and self-pity had clouded my rationality. In all honesty, however, I had found myself in a paradox. On one hand, I was experiencing the feelings that I’ve shared before:

“He was the midnight angel to a soul headed down a path of self-destruction. The first five minutes spent with John, twenty-two years ago, convinced me that he understood me better than any person ever had, or could. When someone walks into your life and pulls you out of a hell, it is hard not to feel that you’ve been rescued by an angel.”

On the other, I didn’t want to believe any of it. I had made my decision to take my own life, and no one was changing my mind. Not even the handsome twink standing inches from my table in the student union. I was tired of being a dominant gay male trapped in a female body. I think I hated feeling powerless to change anything, almost as much as I did the physical traits. I felt like the only way I could stay in control was to harm the thing I hated. Myself.

I had known John was gay from the moment I saw him wearing a purple shirt and sucking on some type of lollipop. I later found out it was a green apple Blow Pop, his favorite. While those are not indicators of a man’s sexual preferences by any means, they certainly complimented his flamboyance. John was exactly the type of gay male that I desired, yet I treated him like a jerk when we met.

“Is this seat taken?” John asked sweetly, slightly swaying back and forth.

“Yes!” I quickly replied.

“I don’t see anyone sitting here.”

“I’m not in the mood for company.”

“The rest of the tables are full,” John said.

“Please go away,” I vehemently spoke, spreading my books across the table. ”Now, the last seat in the whole student union is occupied!”

“I don’t want to.”

“Look…get out of my face!”

“No, because it’s a very handsome face,” John replied. ”I like blonde men like you.”

“Well, I don’t like you! Not now and not ever!”

After all these years, I still remember those first words that I shared with Baby Doll. Everything I said had been a lie, probably some of the biggest lies another person could tell an individual. John had seen my heart, held my secrets, and touched my soul. I was falling in love.

In my writing, I often explore the concept of love at first sight, previously explained by myself below:

“A popular theme that I have alluded to in some of my books and short stories, particularly Inferno and Playboy28, is the concept of love at first sight. Oh for those who doubt that an individual can be consumed, washed in a moments’ breathe, with a love that defies all reason, I can say that I hold a piece of that Heaven in my arms every night.”

I also remember thinking that day, that I had ‘passed’ as a male with John. While I had been perceived as a man before, I had never been looked at in the manner that he was staring at me that afternoon. I hated what Baby Doll was doing to me both emotionally and sexually. The train wreck that I considered my miserable existence, running towards a derailment, was slowly loosing it’s chaotic speed.

John pushed the books aside, and sat down anyway. I can still feel the romantic tension that flowed between us that day. He chattered non-stop, in his sweet and sexy voice, for at least thirty minutes while I pretended to be writing in a notebook. The thoughts I started having, sitting across the small table from him, still make this forty-year-old man flush. They were raw, sexual, and filled with an unusual tenderness.

“What do you do, just go around and hit on strange men, presuming that their gay?” I asked.

“Oh, I know your gay,” John was quick to reply.

“I said I didn’t like you…not now and not ever.”

“I think you said that you didn’t like me, not all men in general.”

Within another ten minutes, I had been asked to dinner. I was being pursued by the gay baby, while fantasizing about chasing him, capturing him within my arms, and placing his body beneath my own.

“I’m hungry,” John spoke.

“Sound like a personal problem to me. Besides, it’s only four o’clock.”

“I don’t like eating alone.”

“Well, I’m sorry. However, I think your smart mouth will manage just fine,” I replied, gathering my books in an attempt to leave.

A warm hand covered my own, caressing my fingertips.

“You look so sad. I want to make you smile,” John whispered.

“No chance at that. Now please let go of my hand.”

“Would you like someone to talk to?” John asked, continuing to suck on his lollipop.

“I thought that’s what we’ve being doing for the past thirty minutes.”

“No, I’ve been talking, and you’ve been scribbling in your notebook. Now have dinner with me. It’s just one meal. Afterwards, if you tell me to leave, I won’t bother you anymore.”

”Fine,” I flippantly replied, “if that will make you leave me alone.”

Dinner came from the drive-through of McDonald’s. Of course being the jerk I was at the time, I insisted on paying for my own food. The setting for our first meal together was the scenic overlook on West Mountain. We ate in complete dead silence. After I finished eating, I abruptly asked John to take me back to the college so I could get my car and go home.

“Look at me,” Baby Doll spoke.

“No! Dinner is over.”

“That may be, but we’re not finished. I want you tell to me why someone as handsome and sexy as you is walking around with a full bottle of different colored pills in his backpack. They fell out of your backpack as we were getting ready to leave the student union.”

I watched as John pulled the bottle from the pocket of his jeans.

Reaching for it in anger I said, “I’m not what you think I am!”

“I already know what you are, a transgender man. Despite how nasty you have treated me, I find myself more attracted to you than I’ve ever been to anyone.”

John’s twined his fingers with mine. I didn’t resist that time.

“I’ll make you a deal. If you want the pills back, you have to tell me why you look so sad and what these pills are for.”

When I finally calmed down, I looked into his eyes, feeling like I had come home. I did most of the talking for the next two hours. By the time I finished, I had given John a history of my life from the first time I realized that I wanted to be a boy at the age of five, to my impending suicide. He had sat quietly the entire time, caressing my fingertips with his own.

Being in Baby Doll’s presence that afternoon, had not only softened my mood, but my heart as well. We kissed that first night, committing to unspoken promises. John had brushed his lips with mine tentatively, pulling his face away. He told me some time later that he wanted to see if I would take control of the situation like the type of gay male he desired. I knew all along why he had stopped. I cradled the back of his head with my hand, pulling his mouth to mine. As I felt his lips part in submission beneath the pressure of my own, I pulled him tightly against my body. In kissing Baby Doll, I was experiencing something that I had only imagined in my fantasies—the sweet submission of a flamboyant gay male in my arms.

He gave the pills back to me that night. I threw them in the trash a few weeks later. I had to make some promises to him that night. One, was that I would be alive the next morning to have breakfast with him before class. The next, was that if I made it to breakfast I had to at least live through the holiday season. He told me that I wouldn’t get my presents if I didn’t. John won’t say whether or not he had any specific gifts in mind at that time or not. I suspect now that it was a ploy to keep a young suicidal man alive long enough to realize that his life had meaning.

Among the other gifts that John gave during our first holiday season together, the cassette of Christmas songs will always be the most treasured. Of course I lived to open that gift. I also remained alive to hear Baby Doll’s words on Christmas Day.

“Andrew, you’re my heart, my home, my Thanksgiving, and my Christmas. When I was ranting at the table in the student union, asking you all those questions trying to get you to smile, I remember the first question that you finally answered was telling me that one of your favorite holiday songs was O Holy Night.”

“The music is nice…but your love is the best holiday gift of all,” I replied.

John Jericho and I would like to wish all of you Happy Holidays. May you feel hope, love, and peace not only now, but throughout the new year.

To learn more about this series and find a recent list of archives visit: Life With Baby Doll. More will be added, as I continue to update this new site. Due to the increasing popularity of these posts, I have created the permanent tab on my Website that contains information concerning the intense and passionate love affair that I share with my partner, John Jericho.

I enjoy hearing from all of my readers, and look forward to your e-mails. Remember Love is Love…Period.

Andrew K Kinley is a ManLove erotic romance author for Siren-Bookstrand Publishing and LGBTQ rights activist based in Hot Springs, AR. All of his work can be found at: A K Kinley. For questions or comments please e-mail him at authorakkinley@gmail.com.

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